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© 2015 Wei et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

Tomato bacterial wilt caused by Ralstonia solanacearum bacterium is a severe problem in Southern China, where relatively high environmental temperatures commonly prevails during the crop seasons. Previous research has indicated that bacterial wilt disease incidence generally increases during the warm months of summer leading to reduced tomato yield. Moreover, the efficacy of bio-organic fertilizers (BOFs)–organic compost fortified with pathogen-suppressive bacteria—is often lost during the periods of high environmental temperatures. Here we studied if the disease incidence could be reduced and the BOF performance enhanced by simply preponing and postponing the traditional seedling transplantation times to avoid tomato plant development during periods of high environmental temperature. To this end, a continuous, two-year field experiment was conducted to evaluate the performance of BOF in two traditional (late-spring [LS] and early-autumn [EA]) and two alternative (early-spring [ES] and late-autumn [LA]) crop seasons. We found that changing the transplantation times reduced the mean disease incidence from 33.9% (LS) and 54.7% (EA) to 11.1% (ES) and 7.1% (LA), respectively. Reduction in disease incidence correlated with the reduction in R. Solanacearum pathogen density in the tomato plant rhizosphere and stem base. Applying BOF during alternative transplantation treatments improved biocontrol efficiency from 43.4% (LS) and 3.1% (EA) to 67.4% (ES) and 64.8% (LA). On average, the mean maximum air temperatures were positively correlated with the disease incidence, and negatively correlated with the BOF biocontrol efficacy over the crop seasons. Crucially, even though preponing the transplantation time reduced the tomato yield in general, it was still economically more profitable compared to LS season due to reduced crop losses and relatively higher market prices. Preponing and postponing traditional tomato transplantation times to cooler periods could thus offer simple but effective way to control R. solanacearum disease outbreaks.

Details

Title
Altering Transplantation Time to Avoid Periods of High Temperature Can Efficiently Reduce Bacterial Wilt Disease Incidence with Tomato
Author
Zhong, Wei; Jian-Feng, Huang; Hu, Jie; Yi-An, Gu; Chun-Lan, Yang; Xin-Lan, Mei; Qi-Rong, Shen; Yang-Chun, Xu; Ville-Petri Friman
First page
e0139313
Section
Research Article
Publication year
2015
Publication date
Oct 2015
Publisher
Public Library of Science
e-ISSN
19326203
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
1719376392
Copyright
© 2015 Wei et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.